Education

NEW DELHI: The Delhi government plans to centralise the nursery admission process starting next academic year. The proposal will enable parents to apply to their schools of choice through a single online platform.

The government wants to start the process of collecting data from private schools from April this year, and introduce the system for the 2018-19 academic year.

Officials said the centralised system will cover all 1,700 city schools recognised by the Directorate of Education. These include schools on DDA land, which have taken the government to court over its neighbourhood criteria for nursery admissions, calling it an attack on their autonomy .

The government has filed an appeal seeking stay on the high court's interim order, issued on February 14.

"Right now, we are following what the HC has ordered. Once the case is decided, the criteria settled upon will be embedded in the centralised system," said Atishi Marlena, adviser to the education minister. In the new system, parents will be asked to register on the DoE website, following which they will be redirected to the admission form. The basic information (child's name, age, parent details) for all schools will remain the same and be filled on the common form. Once that is done, parents will get to choose the schools of their interest on a map, and respective separate school criteria will be displayed on that form.

For example, if a parent chooses three schools on the map, the online admission form will display three sets of criteria submitted to the DoE by the respective schools."We will get the schools to give us their criteria and create a database. Then that information will be used to create separate algorithms for the schools," said Marlena.

Once completed, the parents will be given a tally of their scores earned for each school applied to, for their own record.

Officials said the new system will make sure there is increased transparency in the admission process, without stepping on the toes of private schools. It will also help streamline admissions and make it hassle-free for parents.

Although getting the technical systems ready to support the proposal might take time, the government wants the schools to start uploading their criteria details by April this year, so that the system is up and running for use in January . "We want to make sure there are no delays in admissions next year," said Marlena.